This sums up what Arch is in my view. Arch is a distribution by the developers, for the developers.

Considering my experience with Arch I'd rather say, it's a raw playground for the end-user. But a developer dedicated distro.. would argue with that:)

archrax wrote:

Gentoo is therefore hopefully my Arch replacement. Similar philosophy, more freedom. I've just finished my first Gentoo build on bare metal and it booted first time, much to my surprise. And this is on a brand new, high spec rig running the latest hardware. So at the moment I am a very happy camper. It took me 3 days to do it (I take a long time because I'm anal and I like to take notes as well as try and understand every command I enter which means a lot or reading around.) Next time will be quicker as I now have the experience and I also saved all the configuration files I could. But I don't want there to be too many next times.

Heh.. now there's my kind of user:) I also like to take notes (have lot's of them), backup/save config files and read, read, READ everything to know, how stuff works and be able to tinker with it. But unfortunatelly that kind of attitude streches Gentoo setup time way beyond productivity.

Overall I would consider Arch a distribution best suited for me (simple, raw, pure, Unix way in mind et.c.), but, as I said earlier, I would be myself if I hadn't tried Gentoo first._________________"If you are using Linux as a development platform, do not skip first learning administration and security. It is a foolish programmer indeed who is not master of his or her own computer"

In comparison, Arch's rules are: Not everything hits testing...Most packages go straight to extra/community unless they're a big suite (like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc) or a core package. For stuff that does go to testing: 2 developer signoffs per arch (so 4 total, since there are only 2 arches supported by Arch) and that's it. No other criteria, as soon as it gets all 4, it can go to core. It could have 100 bugs filed against it the bugtracker, but as long as the developers choose to ignore that, it goes stable...*AND* the developers are extremely bad at "archtesting/QA"...A few months ago, there was a version bump to util-linux (I think) that changed the way some of the disk related stuff in it worked. Here was what one signoff looked like: "I didn't test any of these tools (that actually had changes), but booting worked. Signoff x86_64" ...That's just insane.

That is part of the Arch way.. "if the upstream considers a package stable, so do we.. period". State that along side with minimal to none patching and You should get an environment used by app developers for testing (raw Linux). Since there is little to no change in the package or the surroundings, bugs should be considered app-based and sourced to TUV itself._________________"If you are using Linux as a development platform, do not skip first learning administration and security. It is a foolish programmer indeed who is not master of his or her own computer"

It's funny... I wanted to move from Gentoo to Arch a couple of moths ago, but after entering the forums to ask for some opinions, I got the go-read-the-documentation response That turned me off. I love the Gentoo community for the open support. Even if I ask a basic question, I at least get a link in the response, not the google-it answer.

It's funny... I wanted to move from Gentoo to Arch a couple of moths ago, but after entering the forums to ask for some opinions, I got the go-read-the-documentation response That turned me off. I love the Gentoo community for the open support. Even if I ask a basic question, I at least get a link in the response, not the google-it answer.

I use arch and Gentoo, but I quoted this because I have to agree. What strikes me as funny as gentoo has this reputation as well and it couldn't be further from the truth. I never really had many problems with Arch but have read countless posts where people I think were asking legit questions. I am still a big fan of arch, but Gentoo is definitely my preferred OS

WARNING! This is not intended as a flame ! I think of it as a more detailed write up for people asking in the future. But yeah, it may contain a bit of sarcasm too

Today I had a revelation: I may have been misinterpreting the comma in the Arch underlying principle - KISS
As you may or may not know, The Arch Way can be summarized by the popular acronym KISS = keep it simple, stupid. However, the meaning of the comma between the words "simple" and "stupid" may be ambiguous.
I'm not a professor of the English language, but normally I interpret the comma as a delimiter from the part addressing someone referred to as "stupid"

But in this case, I think I was wrong. All the tools provided in Arch (well, the alpm library has grown a lot, but the design is still relatively simple) are really simple, but this imposes many difficulties when you are not trying achieve something simple, e.g. downgrading libraries on which many other packages depend and/or rebuilding them with ABS, soname bumps with IgnorePkg, config file management, optdepends management, control sums management.

For all these problems solutions exist of course, but they are beyond simple in terms of the actions needed to be taken and require a lot of time.
I used to encounter them quite often whenever I was deviating from the default Arch policies, e.g. trying to freeze some core stuff vs. fast-paced rolling-release. But when I stayed within the boundaries, yes, downloading and installing a package was often a matter of seconds which I really enjoyed.

So, my conclusion is that the comma in this case stands for enumeration and for the sake of unambiguity

Code:

s/,/\ and/

should be performed.

And where does Gentoo stand? Well, the underlying design isn't really that simple, but it does enable me to find very simple solutions to problems that I found very time consuming in the Arch reign.

You say that (re)building the packages will take about the same time that I would spend with editing PKGBUILDs, running makepkg in the right order on each one of them and finding and editing/diffing *.pacnew files? Yes you're right. But there is a big difference:

I can just issue some of those commands above once and simply walk away.

I installed Gentoo 3 days ago and moved from Arch Linux (was using Arch Linux for more than 2 years). I don't know the reason why I've done that, because Arch Linux was rocking on my PC without any issues.

Pacman has been handling updates without a problem and was keeping my system as bleeding edge as possible for 2 years without a reinstall. I wanted to try Gentoo and settled it on my Linux-vServer VPS at first place. Played a little bit with it and was feeling like it is the right choice for me so ....

Purged Arch Linux from my PC and installed a fully working Gentoo installation with Xfce which is somehow working better than Arch Linux. It's more smooth and lightweight and is rocking in the terms of stability. Don't know how it would be performing updates and keeping it up-to-date without breaking to an unusable state but we'll see as the time will say ...

I've been a Archlinux user for about a year i guess and since about 3 months i'm running Gentoo.I have to say,the only thing i miss about Arch is the wiki,it's the best documentation i ever saw.But from my point of view Gentoo it's the best,i dont feel like trying/using something else.I love portage,the philosophy,the option to compile everythng whit what you like and what you need,it's simply amazing ! My advice for who want to decide between them it's to try them both.But i have to say if you like to tweak your system,to learn everyday new things,etc go whit Gentoo.If you prefer a easy,fast system that you dont have the time or pleasure to play whit,go whit Arch.Ohh and i forgot,the Gentoo community it's the best,seriously!

attempting to use git mesa snapshots and keeping the package manager happy wrt to integrity of dependency tree can be quite a chore on arch.

also arch has less testing wrt to toolchain - e.g. they push new gcc packages quickly, while gentoo maintainers are still busy fixing various packages to build with it. i would assume that manual rebuild of whole 'core' repository (somewhat an equivalent of gentoo's system set) with just introduced gcc would most likely fail on arch.

I had been using Arch for several years almost since the project had started. I had Gentoo installed on several machines, and switched to it entirely several months ago, when I got tired of all that crap like dbus or gnome daemons getting installed into my system through dependencies without my concern. Its much easier to get rid of this stuff in gentoo.

I have a kodak printer where the kodak driver only works with cups 1.5x. If you are doing a fresh arch install it only installs the latest version which is 1.6x. So to get cups 1.5x working I have to download the tarball manually and set it all up separately. In gentoo, using portage, I can just mask anything >=cups.16 and problem is solved. Arch is totally bleeding edge. If you install the latest package and it doesn't work and you forgot to put a hold on the package it is not an easy process to roll back.

Gentoo still makes it easy to install gnome 2.32 which is still in my opinion the best gnome ever released. There is now a fork of gnome 2.32 on other linuxes called MATE but its still a bit buggy.

Also, the gentoo folks on these forums are very helpful with any problems! 100000x better than any other linux forum. It does take a bit longer to set-up a gentoo box but its much easier to manage.

I came to Gentoo from Arch to reclaim control of my system. In the past 6 months to a year, Arch devs have slowly introduced systemd into the system that they ship, complete with all sorts of unneeded dependencies (such as xorg, cupsd, etc). Instead of splitting the systemd package up between systemd, udev, and dbus, they shipped systemd as-is and used it as the backbone of an Arch installation. While it was possible to switch to another init, one cannot fully remove systemd from an Arch installation. Since I have ideological objections to systemd and couldn't clean my system up the way I wanted to, I switched to Gentoo.

What I found was a distribution that falls in line with what I think a distro should do: give users ultimate power over the system, to tweak it as far as they want. Gentoo does this incredibly well. The only way I could see getting more control is manually rebuilding the packages, and that's just too time-consuming. USE flags and (truly) sane packaging defaults make using Gentoo a satisfying experience, even when I have to rebuild a few times because I was derpy and missed some USE flags. It takes more time, but I pull in less dependencies and some things run noticeably faster (Fluxbox, urxvt, even Firefox to a minor degree). No complaints here.

My personal quirks aside, Arch is still a good distro. It's just lost sight of UNIX philosophy and total user choice.

I went to Arch for awhile because Gentoo was having some issues and I simply didn't have time to deal with it. Gentoo is my favorite distro, but Arch is a good one too. I have an Arch varient Archbang up on the netbook._________________Sarah Fish

The very first time I used arch was already after using Gentoo full time on my main desktop, but I had been using it on my laptop since mid 2008. Overheating made it unlikely to build larger packages, and even if I could use a desktop to build packages it still wasn't as reliable as downloading the ready package once. The thing with arch is that the distro is really bleeding edge, I had quite a few segfaults, and even kernel locks with random freezing, that's when I started building my own kernel (managing modules was a pain, but still "manageable"). Then came all the systemd hype, like sporkbox I did not want a system with it's own claimed universal reality (it's own tools, it's own binary formats, it's own way, completely closed, and in a would be open system completely alien in nature), so I started reading most of what I could find and finally discovered that ArchBang would keep and still maintain init-scripts. That's when I actually jumped ship, if I can put it that way. There is really no difference to me since all I need is a handful of programs but with lots of dependencies, the real difference keeps being choice, the gift that keeps on giving (now if only Gentoo pre-built-packages-only as an option and no, Sabayon is not Gentoo, but I guess even Gentoo wouldn't be Gentoo that way, oh well choice can't be always easy...).

I just moved from Arch Linux to Gentoo after having tried the former for a couple of months. For me, the main downside with Arch Linux is that they build packages with certain options enabled but then they let you install those packages without all the required dependencies. In fact, they consider some dependencies as optional, while they are not. For example, the "xchat" package has been compiled with --enable-tcl option, but you can install it without the tcl package. Of course, the main consequence is that you get a "not found" error when you run XChat. With Gentoo, I can simply enable or disable the tcl USE flag. I once scanned all executables on my Arch Linux system looking for missing libraries, and I found lots of them. In Gentoo, I don't have this problem. In short, with Gentoo I can build my system exactly as I want it to be. With Arch Linux, instead, you can do much, but then you have to deal with the binary nature of the distribution. Long emerge times can be a problem anyway, but I can deal with them.

I used Gentoo about 3 years ago, for about 6 months then moved to Arch because I had bad hardware and at the time I was quite impatient (I've done some mental growing up since then and lost the sadistic habit of watching a scrolling terminal, -vq "ftw") - I stayed there for 2 years, during which I got some fairly modern gear.
I came back here at the end of June, before which I spent a couple of months compiling my whole Arch system from source, it's not a supported method and it caused some odd stuff a couple of times (it was also completely pointless unless I edited every PKGBUILD) but I had an itch to scratch, so I came running back

I am just curious to know if someone has moved away from Arch and towards Gentoo or vice versa.

i've been into gentoo, since my earliest researches into various distros, even before being a distro-slut (over 400 iso dl and tried). though it took me a while to get around to getting a genuine pure gentoo install. i certainly had gentoo-based distros before i had an arch/parabola/whatever, but i think i had arch installed [like ᴙeal man] before i had gentoo install [like ᴙeal man].

so for a long time (ever since getting my third box), i had a debian, an arch, and a gentoo based.

it wasnt long before the debian got up'd to sid repo, to also be rolling.

so... that's the background...

and what now?

bye bye arch.

had enough of it. i dont mind that a rolling release might want you to hold it's hand a little more, i dont mind that a distro would have the extra intricacies and features and augments that add a little complexity, i dont even mind that the ocasional package will not work...

... what i do mind, is that my machine can go belly up at upgrade, and i'm just supposed to go to the website to check it's not likely to do so. why can't they pipe that to the package manager, have some checks and balances... what?... does that contravein the arch way philosophy? then i say the philosophy is broken, because it can lead to drastic unpleasantness.

in gentoo... things can go wrong, packages can have issues, and... yeah... all the same, except!!!! in gentoo, it doesnt belly-up your entire system

what made me ditch arch, was that i was fixing one of those issues, following the instructions on the site, to the letter, and THAT was what made it all go wrong.

... yeah... i could have got a live cd, and chrooted in, and faffed around fixing it... but seriously... why? why, oh why, oh why, would i want to bother going through that, for arch? is having a "convenient" binary-based rolling distro on the bleeding edge really that important?

nope. not to me. not for that pain in the bum. not any more.

i've saveged a number of gentoo, and gentoo-based instalations.
i dont consider myself by any means, an expert. infact i consider myself quite the noob still. but even so, i have managed to bring back many a gentoo from the edge of death, and never belly-up'd the entire os's useability. no chroot (except installation) was ever required to fix anything. if a package is going to be so drastically fatally dangerous, then (much thanks to developers and maintainers) the package manager keeps me safe and informed about it. i actually have to go out of my way to seriously break my gentoo. even when going seriously out of my way to NOT break arch, it still broke.

arch vs gentoo?

well, for my use-case, that's answered. ^_^

p.s. (complaining about emerge/install/compile times, as a reason to not use gentoo, seems absurd to me ~ each to their own preferences tho, right?)

I moved to Gentoo many many years ago (9 or more), from Slackware/SuSE. And I used it on 4 webservers and occasionally on my desktop. I loved the idea of customising and fine-tuning even though I'd barely got an idea of what I was doing. However the community was helpful and understanding in helping me learn.

Linux was still young when it came to gaming, so as a gamer I moved back to WinXP on my desktop. As for the servers, I have no idea the state they are in now as I left the company where I installed them.

More recently, I decided to come back to linux and play again, but I ended up going with Arch as it seemed far easier than Gentoo, but also offered a rolling-release (a feature I decided any distro I chose MUST have). I broke things many many times. If I left my new webserver for 3 months running (it was stable!) and then decided to update it... bang, filesystem/etc/systemd/gcc.... WTF?! My system crashed catastrophically due to the amount of core changes they made. When I asked for support I got told rudely "Well you should've kept upto date every week at minimum.", I persevered and carried on though.

I couldnt find anything on their wiki about systemd problem I had. I installed systemd as I was forced to, but kept getting warnings, turns out by default my on inittab 3 runlevel was being ignored by the 'upgrade'. Approaching the forums I got told I should've read up on systemd fully before installing it (it was forced as a dependancy! I didn't choose it), and was given a warning for asking why the package installer couldn't have set the target based on my current settings. It wasn't a complaint, just an inquiry that resulted in a warning.

I reported bugs with their WebMin package (missing .cgi and .pl files for allowing it to install modules/updates), I got told "That's a feature not a bug, it's not the arch way". So the "Arch way" is not customise or add to packages on your machine outside of config files.

Not good experiences with the community and the Arch Way. However, the good thing about Arch was that it allowed me more flexibility in my OS than ones like Ubuntu/SuSE, and forced me to learn things. Just over a year with Arch, and my linux knowledge has tripled. Enough to the point where I feel like I can return to Gentoo and appreciate it more and do more with it than I would have otherwise as a n00b.

I've been an Arch Linux enthusiast for several years. It's actually the first Linux distribution I ever installed. I skipped the usual entry-level *buntu install most start with and had really no knowledge of even bash when I started. Yep, that was pretty painful, but fun. Really do like the rolling release style of distribution and I find the setup to be extremely easy with Arch, albeit I've blown through it many times.

Without getting into tedious details, I'm trying to migrate away from Arch though and Gentoo is a logical choice for me. The only logical alternative for me in fact.

So... going through the headache of doing an install with full disk encryption. Gentoo's procedure for this seems a good bit more convoluted than on Arch (first couple attempts failed so far), but my laptop would feel incomplete without it, so I'll get through the process.

Looking forward to seeing some of you in IRC and such. Hopefully there's the same delicious elitism we've all come to know and grudgingly love/hate in the 'nix community. _________________The body is a cage, entwining and burdening the mind so as to halt expansion.

I had Arch Linux on my laptop for a couple of weeks, but I removed it last week. I had decided to share my boot partition with Arch and the funny thing was that when it set up grub2, it auto detected my Gentoo kernel and added a grub entry which gave me the option of booting Arch with the Gentoo kernel. That was a bit weird, think I tried it once, but wasn't sure what it would do to my system so I didn't try it again.

Anyway, what made me turn away from Arch is that I needed to install a package manually from source, and the package was written in python2. Buuuut, the default python in Arch is 3, and no way of changing it to python2. In arch the python command is ver 3 by default, and to compile python2 code you use the python2 command. I didn't know how to get the package cmake setup to use python2 rather than python (i.e. 3) and finally gave up. In Gentoo it is so much easier ... just use eselect python and you are good to go.

I have both Gentoo and Arch installed. But I do not use Arch because of Arch based on systemd. It is a really ass pain, all these 'after', 'before', 'wants', 'requires', and other rules... Systemd should be renamed to 'systemchaos'. Chaos of services.
I hope systemd will appear in stable Gentoo as late as possible.

For the record I have/had been a long time Arch user (since 2006) and a even longer Gentoo user (since 2002) and i'm not using Gentoo at the moment, I went back to Arch to test the waters of systemd, however i'm done with ArchLinux and it's egoistic devs, and shitty elitist attitude community.

What's sad is Arch devs, namely Allan McRae, has been actively bashing other distros based on Arch [Manjaro, ArchBang, etc] citing "security issues" because those other distros chose to do further testing on archlinux packages before releasing them as stable. That takes some balls to discredit other distros based on Arch itself, and thats really painting the kettle black because it took the Arch Team YEARS to implement package signatures, etc all because of their retarded reverence to the "KISS philosophy" which is part of "The Arch Way".

Allan's whole philosophy is that with their [ArchLinux] bleeding edge rolling release scheme will patch securities faster than those from a well tested cutting edge rolling release distro, or non-rolling distro. Is he that stupid to not see that their mediocre "testing" phase can and will introduce further securities issues? Now, in all honesty no Linux distro or OS on this planet is "security perfect" but I can honestly say that Arch's "testing" is a joke. They focus too much on being a "bleeding edge" rolling distro with packages that can and do break than being a "cutting edge" rolling distro that has a decent testing scheme, and for them to bitch about other distros based on Arch is really pathetic and really egotistical IMHO.

Allan in a previous blog posts even gripes about how they [ArchLinux] and it's community are viewed as "elitist pricks"... has he ever thought that people see their community as that way, because they ARE that way? "Help" isn't in the vocabulary of most Arch users or devs, it's "Keep It Simple, Stupid" philosphy and it's "RTFM" in other words it's "We don't want to help you; so read our Godlike inspired wiki for all knowledge, or don't use Arch" attitude that has made their community piss-poor and viewed by many as elitist-pricks. A quick fix solution is what most people want and need, not a run around or have to scan through kb of txt to find the help. They view the whole idea of helping someone as "spoonfeeding" or "hand holding". It's that attitude why ArchLinux always will remain a hobbiest distro.

Now, i'm not saying that one dev's views are making the whole dev team look bad, however, the Arch Team usually think as a collective [which is a correct way for any dev team to work]... but in other words what im saying is, that how one dev feels they all pretty much share the same opinion.

There's just a slew of things wrong with "The Arch Way", the Arch's devs and it's community, period._________________Linux. Freedom. Power.

LMAO: oh God, thank you: you've given me an antidote to the stress when people start going on about systemd and the issues they're having with it on IRC. Instead of frowning, I'll smile as your words come to mind. Priceless.

I came to Gentoo from Arch to reclaim control of my system. In the past 6 months to a year, Arch devs have slowly introduced systemd into the system that they ship, complete with all sorts of unneeded dependencies (such as xorg, cupsd, etc). Instead of splitting the systemd package up between systemd, udev, and dbus, they shipped systemd as-is and used it as the backbone of an Arch installation. While it was possible to switch to another init, one cannot fully remove systemd from an Arch installation. Since I have ideological objections to systemd and couldn't clean my system up the way I wanted to, I switched to Gentoo.

What I found was a distribution that falls in line with what I think a distro should do: give users ultimate power over the system, to tweak it as far as they want. Gentoo does this incredibly well. The only way I could see getting more control is manually rebuilding the packages, and that's just too time-consuming. USE flags and (truly) sane packaging defaults make using Gentoo a satisfying experience, even when I have to rebuild a few times because I was derpy and missed some USE flags. It takes more time, but I pull in less dependencies and some things run noticeably faster (Fluxbox, urxvt, even Firefox to a minor degree). No complaints here.

My personal quirks aside, Arch is still a good distro. It's just lost sight of UNIX philosophy and total user choice.

THIS, and:

PhaytalError wrote:

I have/had been a long time Arch user (since 2006) and a even longer Gentoo user (since 2002) and i'm not using Gentoo at the moment, I went back to Arch to test the waters of systemd, however i'm done with ArchLinux and it's egoistic devs, and shitty elitist attitude community.

THIS.

These words exactly describe my reasons for migrating everything (which is a lot, really) to Gentoo. I too have been a Gentoo user for a long time, went away for a while (to Arch), but yes indeed, switched back. I can't add much to the above quotes because they exactly describe how I feel about Arch now, too. And now that I'm back with my old and trusted distribution, I couldn't describe the happiness I am experiencing.

Gentoo. It has never let me down. Way to go._________________Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way.
-- Daniele Vare